Recently Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, described how the police are guilty of saying, ‘yes we can,’ too much and how, when it comes to other agencies, “we have to make collaboration work or we’ll be picking up the pieces from society’s failings” (Hogan-Howe 2015, p.26). Others, such as Sir Peter Fahy, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, have warned of a time when the police will only be able to provide a reactive, as opposed to preventative, service.

In January of this year the College of Policing published its analysis of demand on the police service. Based on data gathered from across the country their research demonstrated how demand is not just increasing but is also changing, with increased pressures in respect of mental health, missing persons and other protective statutory requirements.

What was interesting about this research was how little is known about preventing demand; “there is a limited amount of information on the amount of time the police spend undertaking problem solving … [on activities that allow] police to drive down crime” (College of Policing 2015, p.12). According to the research we are becoming clearer on the increasing demands the police face and the time it consumes, but we’re still unclear on the time invested in preventing the demand occurring in the first place. This leads me to pose the question, ‘what priority is placed on officers to spend the time, which may take months or even years, to reduce the unprecedented demands faced by the police?’

To reduce demand on the police by children’s homes, hospitals, care homes, and those tasked with the welfare of the more vulnerable in society, might just require a change in how the police service is viewed. Perhaps the problem isn’t demand on the police, but on how society, its communities and individuals view the role of the police and other agencies. Through a generation of ‘service provision’ and catchy lines such as, ‘You Said, We Did,’ have we achieved nothing more than a situation where many in our communities consider the first stage in resolving their problems to be a phone call to the police? And to perpetuate that situation, have the police been guilty of saying, ‘yes we can,’ in response?

I was at a PACT meeting recently where a neighbourhood sergeant gave an account of what his team had been doing over a three-month period. He described the demand they faced by just a few families with their disputes and the nuisance they caused to other members of the community.

What struck me was the phrase he used to end his account, how, ‘none of it was police related.’ So if it wasn’t police related then why were the police dealing with it? And what exactly was the ‘it?’ When I described this scenario to a senior officer recently he explained how in dealing with this demand in the here and now they had prevented more demand in future. I’m not convinced.

The problem here isn’t demand; it’s a culture of reliance built up through years of the police and other agencies consistently responding to incidents (or are they just events?) where individuals and communities have lost the ability to manage situations themselves. They call the police, the police say yes, and then find themselves entwined in a game of, ‘touched you last.’ Once embroiled in the ‘event’ police find themselves trapped as players in a game that shouldn’t be theirs to play. Is this the ‘invisible demand’ that is the real cause of the police struggling to cope with austerity?

While the demand described above starts with a non-police related event, there’s another type of ‘invisible demand,’ where the police and/or other agencies put solutions to problems in place that are the cause of further demand.

Consider the sign pictured in this blog. Yes, it really does say, ‘Games Prohibited,’ and yes, there are several of them still displayed in residential communities. We use this sign as a demand related case study in our courses (on the Skills for Justice Awards programme), where our delegates usually pose questions such as: ‘What’s the problem this sign is trying to solve?’ ‘Who put it up?’ ‘Why did they put it up?’ and, ‘how are you going to manage a caller who reports individuals breaching the sign’s conditions?’

Over 600 police and council officers across the country have gone through this exercise with the same questions being posed every time we run it. The answers they come up with follow a common theme:

The council, following consultation with police and other agencies, put up the signs. They are there to regulate the ‘anti social behaviour’ committed while people (mostly young) play ball games and if a call comes in (mostly to the police) we’ll have to record and deal with it.

What follows next is an exercise where we play out a report complaining of a ‘breach of the sign’ from a member of the public all the way to a police officer, PCSO or council officer visiting the caller. The smallest number of people the report has ‘touched’ in a new game of ‘touched you last’ as it goes from call taker to officer attending is seven and the most, thirteen. Invariably the exercise ends with the attending officer telling the caller, ‘there’s nothing we can do to enforce the sign.’

Sometimes we add a layer of complexity to the report with the caller stating how the behaviour behind the breach of the sign is causing them to feel vulnerable and at risk (or are callers just getting better at playing word games to press the right police buttons?). This scenario invariably leads to promises of additional patrols, providing words of advice to those involved and invariably a neighbour dispute as, ‘they got the police onto our kids!’ More demand, the type that grows and evolves as more players (neighbours, highways, housing, council, councillors) get involved in the game.

But just whose problem is this (I know, we don’t even know what the problem is)? Police? Housing? Council? Highways? Who should be managing the demand caused by this sign? The obvious conclusion is the agency who put it up should be responsible for ‘policing’ it? The end result is always the same; the message on the sign can’t be enforced, which leads to frustration from the community who expect services to provide workable solutions.

Recently I heard about a Community Trigger activation (where dissatisfied victims of ‘ASB’ can hold services to account if they’re not happy with the service provided) over a ‘No Ball Games’ sign not being enforced. The council / police solution was to take the sign down. However, residents have been left scratching their heads – who is going to deal with the behaviour now the sign has been taken down?

Through the adoption of ‘yes we can’ have we created a society that will continue to create more and more ‘invisible demand’ for the police and other services? Where demand is perpetuated by services that keep answering calls for service because they can’t say no and where the solutions to problems within communities from the police and other services do nothing more than create further demand?

While the police may not be able to reduce the demand from issues concerning mental health and such like, could they better tackle the ‘invisible demand?’ There is an argument that individuals and communities are better equipped to manage disputes and problems within neighbourhoods. After all, don’t they have more of an incentive to resolve issues that concern them directly? However, instead of a ‘yes we can’ approach, the other extreme of, ‘no, that’s not our role,’ might be counter productive in respect of confidence in the police. The initially more difficult to manage answer will be, ‘we can’t deal with that for you, but we can support you in providing the skills to find your own solutions.’

Tackling loan sharks, organised crime gangs, drug dealers, sexual exploitation and other forms of specialist demand is the easy bit when it comes to demand, the police already have a recipe that works and can be improved on.

In terms of public reports, the position on privatisation taken in the 2013 report of the self-styled “Independent Police Commission”, titled Policing for a Better Britain, provides a good place to start. The Commission was chaired by a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner (Lord Stevens), and was comprised of 39 members. Eight of these were associated with the private security sector, and at least three of those had previously held senior public police positions. Despite its title, the Commission’s report was almost all about the public police. Less than seven pages of its 225-page report were devoted to a discussion of the role of the private sector in policing and security provision in Britain, and this discussion was framed entirely in terms of public police “partnerships with the private sector” and the “outsourcing” of “public police functions” to private sector contractors (pp. 67-71).

Despite a passing reference (on p. 145) to Brodeur’s (2010) idea of a “policing web” (correctly characterised in the report as “a complex, interwoven net of public and private agencies responsible for policing and security within any given society”), the possible implications of this idea for the future of policing in Britain were not considered in the report. There was no discussion of the significant contributions that private sector policing provision makes independently of the public police. Instead, all of the Stevens Report’s discussion about privatised policing focussed on the supposed risks involved in outsourcing of public police functions, examples of problems in this respect (e.g. the London Olympics “G4S fiasco” (p. 68) – for which, of course, the government that contracted with them was equally to blame), some suggestions as to how these risks may best be minimised and managed, and a set of five principles to ensure that such outsourcing would be extremely limited. In other words, the report’s review of the role of the private sector in policing and security provision was an entirely public police-centred one which did not in any way address the radically changing policing provision environment in which pluralisation of policing provision has become the norm, both domestically and internationally, or what might be the appropriate role of the public police and their relationships with other policing providers within this changing environment. None of the burgeoning academic literature on this topic was cited in the report. In this respect, the Stevens Report is in sharp contrast to the recently released Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel’s report on Policing Canada in the 21^st Century: New Policing for New Challenges

There is little doubt that the Stevens Report’s discussion of police privatisation was strongly influenced by the overwhelmingly negative literature on private policing that has recently emanated from some police scholars in the U.K., with titles referring to it in such terms as “A Tainted Trade?” and “Private Security: Democracy’s Dirty Little Secret”. Indeed one of these scholars was a member of the Stevens Commission. A great deal of British (and not just British) literature on private security focuses (typically anecdotally rather than systematically) on problems associated with the contract security industry, while almost none of it discusses the role of in-house security organisations (many of which are headed up by former senior public police officers), or the significant positive contributions that the private security sector makes to the security and safety of citizens, as well as to national security and anti-terrorism, around the world. Equally importantly, much of the recent academic literature on private security takes a strong normative position against private sector involvement in public security and safety provision while glossing over the empirical evidence of the pervasiveness of this involvement all over the world. While Hugo Chavez, for instance, was ideologically opposed to private security in Venezuela, it is sobering to think what the security and safety of people in cities such as Caracas, Johannesburg or Kabul, to name only a few, would be like if they weren’t there. Indeed, President Hamid Karzai’s proposal in 2010 to ban private security from Afghanistan provoked an anguished outcry from international humanitarian organisations and several diplomatic missions in that country, who insisted that private security were the only people who effectively guaranteed the security and safety of their employees, since the state (public) police were corrupt, infiltrated by insurgents, under-resourced, ill-trained, unreliable, and prone to desertion in the face of challenge. The proposal was soon abandoned. Such problems have commonly driven the resort to, and reliance on, private security protection in many countries of the world.

Calls by myself and other colleagues (most recently, Stenning & Shearing 2012; see also Ayling, Grabosky & Shearing 2009) for a more balanced, less police-centred, less emotive and ideologically charged, and more empirically informed debate about the role of the private sector in an era of plural and globalised policing provision (Brodeur’s ‘policing web’), have gone largely unheeded by most of those who profess to be ‘policing’ (as opposed to just ‘police’) scholars. Until this changes, the development of sound policing policy to address the policing challenges of the 21^st Century will continue to be an elusive goal. Perhaps the members of the Policing Network can be looked to to encourage and undertake the kinds of research that are needed to inform such a debate.

This blog is not an obituary or lament to the drug squad, for they are not dead and buried within the history of policing but still very much alive and kicking their way through the doors of suspected drug offenders in this country and further afield. The point I want to make with this somewhat overly dramatic title is that drug squads are an endangered species with an uncertain future.

In a crude nutshell, drug squads are specialist detective units licensed to police drug markets and drug-related criminality. They have been a key element of drug law enforcement since around the 1960s, when widespread moral panic about the taking of drugs by young people prompted a dedicated and specialised police response to the novel and increasingly notorious ‘drug problem’. As half of the first full-time two-man drug squad in the north-east of England, Malcolm Young has subsequently written that he was ‘tasked with defining and dealing with the new social aberration of “flower power”, “the counter culture”, and the “psychedelic trip”’.  Up until this point in the history of drug control, drugs had been policed in a relatively routine and haphazard manner, as and when police officers stumbled across or were called upon to do something about suspected drug offenders in their area. As drug problems worsened in the 1980s, an era when ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric was reverberating on both sides of the Atlantic, the enforcement approach came to dominate drug control policy. The Thatcher government came down hard on the people responsible for international trafficking and domestic supply, pumped exorbitant amounts of money into the campaign, and gave the police more powers. Although they differed significantly in terms of their organisation and operations, by the late 1980s, all of the police forces in England and Wales had drugs squads in place.

Over the past decade or so, however, there has been a substantial decline in the number of drug squads operating at both force and district level. To further investigate this largely unreported sea change in drug policy, I set out to examine the culture and daily activities of plain clothes drug detectives working in two contrasting constabularies: one metropolitan area in the south, which I call ‘Metropolis’, and a small town in the north, ‘Smallville’.

Before fieldwork commenced in Metropolis, I learned that the drug squad had become the firearms squad a few years earlier, and while the detectives employed therein remained the primary drug law enforcers of the district, their focus was now on firearms offences. Towards the end of the fieldwork period their focus changed to gang-related criminal activity and the firearms squad was rechristened the gang squad. As for the situation in Smallville, plans were put into motion to disband the drug squad as the research project was coming to a close, with the intention of merging the separate squads of the proactive investigation department into a generalist crime squad.

The Smallville detectives did not react terribly well to the pending demise of the drug squad. It provoked them into questioning the motivations and competencies of their supervisors and chief officers. Signs of anger and frustration were regularly displayed as they told me about how management ‘didn’t have a clue’ and would ‘end up regretting their decision’. The detectives were convinced that drug dealers would take advantage of their newfound freedom and in turn there would be more drugs on the streets and more drug-related crime. They truly believed in the importance of their work, so not only did the decision to disband the squad deprive them of their territory, it also challenged their sense of mission and made them feel devalued and dejected. From their perspective, the police service no longer considered the control of drug supply to be a priority and this was a huge mistake. The Metropolis detectives said they remembered reacting similarly when the drug squad became the firearms squad, but they soon accepted the decision and the need to concentrate on dealing with the most harmful criminal elements of the drug trade, seeing as ‘it is impossible to deal with them all’.

This downgrading of drug policing can probably be attributed to a combination of three factors: resources, results and realisation.

Social distancing and other measures put in place to deal with COVID-19 mean that police have had to rapidly change the ways they think about ‘contact’ with the public. Technology has been at the forefront of these developments, providing multiple channels for police-public interaction without the need for physical co-presence. Some forces have launched new, or promoted existing, portals for the online reporting of ‘traditional’ crimes (e.g. West Midlands Police, where the public can interact with the force via a ‘chatbot’ called Bob-E) or launched bespoke forms for reporting non-compliance with lockdown restrictions. Forces have increasingly been resolving enquiries over the telephone instead of in person, and there has been extensive use of social media to enable the police to stay in touch with the public, and vice versa. At least one force (Derbyshire) has used drone technology to capture examples of noncompliant behaviour, shame those involved, and send a message to the wider population. Not all of these developments have been well-received. References to ‘snooper forms’ and a ‘snoopers charter’ for example, have implied something unfair or untoward about reporting on your neighbours, whilst drone use has been deemed ‘sinister’ and ‘badly misjudged’ .

Increasing technological mediation of police-public contact was a significant trend in UK policing and criminal justice before COVID-19, but it has been hastened by the need for society to function when people cannot be in physical proximity to each other. This is also a trend we can safely assume will persist once we emerge from the current restrictions – but it remains under-explored in some important ways.

The legitimacy of the police has been a theme of several academic contributions since the start of lockdown. The term is explored in different ways by Stephen Reicher and Cliff Stott, Ian Loader and Emma Williams, and by Sara Grace elsewhere in this series. At a time when public health outcomes are reliant on people complying with the restrictions, the legitimacy of those enforcing them is of central importance. We know that a sense of procedural justice, and of police legitimacy, is shaped in the encounters that people have with the police, but what happens when the police move a significant number of those encounters online, or when the police try to be ‘present’ in communities via social media? Drawing on our recent work together, we reflect here on the implications of the use of technology in public-police contact both in the present circumstances and for the future.

Compatible trends?

Over recent years, but particularly in recent weeks, the ways in which members of the public can contact the police have undergone significant changes. Whilst much contact pre-COVID-19 was still face-to-face, or at least person-to-person, many police organisations have introduced different types of communication technology, such as online crime reporting and answering queries, and the use of social media. Technology may also be present in face-to-face interactions, for example with body worn video cameras and mobile data terminals. As a result, the public is increasingly likely to encounter policing in ways that are ‘technologically-mediated’. Whilst some of these developments have expanded due to the particular challenges of the COVID-19 crisis, it seems likely that all will remain with us in some form once mobility and socialising restrictions are lifted.

Pre-crisis, the National Police Chiefs’ Council already supported this shift to technologically-mediated forms of contact, asserting that the public expect a significant online presence from police (NPCC, n.d.). In some forces, efforts to move to more ‘digital ways of working’ have been explicitly linked to increasing ‘public confidence, participation and satisfaction’ (Accenture, n.d.). However, much of this appears to be unevidenced, and relatively little is known about what the public actually wants and needs – a characteristic of ‘technology-push’ rather than ‘user-pull’ approaches to digital solutions (SOCITM, 2018).

So, whilst attention is paid to what technology can do for the police, the public side of this encounter has barely been considered. Online reporting (for example) may be particularly useful for some people or some crime types, but we do not know enough about how people experience these types of interactions to be confident that they will be of benefit to everyone, in all circumstances. We also do not know if and how these developments might affect the way people feel about, and interact with, the police.

Procedural justice and its assumptions

Popular legitimacy is central to the functioning of the police. Yet, recent technological developments have been initiated in response to technological advances at a societal level, the demands of austerity, and most recently the consequences of the global pandemic, with little regard to how they will be received by the public or what differences in reception there may be between particular ‘publics’. Can we be confident that our theories of police legitimacy are future-proof when that future is heavily reliant on technologically-mediated encounters? The extent to which procedural justice is the central antecedent of legitimacy in many contexts makes this a particularly pressing question.

At the core of procedural justice theory lies the idea that people attend closely to the quality of interactions with authority figures such as police, particularly across dimensions of respect, neutrality, transparency, and ‘voice’. An unexplored assumption persists within procedural justice theory is that police-public contact is face-to-face and between two humans. Technology is, however, increasingly an additional ‘party’ (Rabinovich-Einy and Katsh, 2014) in such encounters, and it is essential that any disruptive effects on both those interactions and the theories used to understand them are explored. We do not know whether procedural justice ‘works’ in the same way when police-public interaction is mediated by technology, or indeed which qualities of face-to-face interaction, if any, are necessary to maintain public confidence in the face of technological change. This is of fundamental importance to understanding whether new forms of contact, and the police actions they herald, will be viewed as legitimate by various publics.

Lessons from other contexts

Whilst one of the strengths of the procedural justice approach is its applicability across a range of contexts and demographics (Wolfe et al. 2016), the use of technology is not experienced, viewed, or accessible in the same way by all. Older service users for example may ‘read off’ different signals from technologically-mediated encounters than younger people (Radzinovich-Einy and Katsh, 2014). Technology may facilitate access for groups with varying requirements, e.g. the deaf community, if it is appropriately designed, but access may also be a challenge such as in remote rural areas which lack high speed internet access, or mobile phone coverage. Individuals are unlikely to share information through an online tool if they do not have confidence in the security of the system and the police (Aston et al. under review): and trust is strongly related to face-to-face engagement and relationship building (Hail, Aston and O’Neill, 2018).

The non-discriminatory potential of new technologies has been stressed (Joh 2007). Yet, we know that consistency and impartiality are only two of the significant antecedents of a procedurally just experience: more human qualities, such as politeness, respect and voice are also important. As Terpstra et al. point out, new processes and systems often do not ‘take into account that many citizens have the emotional need to tell their story in person’ (2019: 9), while Bowling and Iyer (2019: 152) describe the ‘craft’ skills of ‘human judgement and adaptability … attentiveness, sympathy and kindness’ that are required of police. Some technologies, particularly those that allow tracking and monitoring, may shift the focus to ‘what you do’ and away from ‘how you do it’ – the precise opposite of the central claim of procedural justice theory, that process is as or more important than outcome.

The Chicago Police Department chose a training strategy. A “Procedural Justice and Legitimacy Workshop” was developed locally, after consultation with experts (Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares) at the Yale Law School. Classes of about 25 officers met with teams of three trainers for day-long sessions at the Chicago Police Training Academy. From mid-2012 through September 2013, 8,700 serving officers, 230 new recruits, and many of the department’s civilian employees were trained in the principles of procedural justice and how to implement them.

Our research team conducted two studies evaluating this effort. The short-term effects study was a quasi-experimental test of the immediate effectiveness of the training conducted at the academy. We found that training increased officer support for all of the procedural justice dimensions included in the experiment: respect, voice, neutrality and trust. A longer-term effects study followed. It utilized the results of an in-person survey of 714 Police Officers (the lowest rank) and Sergeants officer survey that began mid-way through the training period. Officers who had already been sent to training were contrasted with a comparison group of officers who had not yet been sent to training. Statistical controls (including propensity scores) were used to increase confidence in the results of the long-term effects study. We found that officers who had attended the procedural justice workshop continued to be more supportive of three of the four procedural justice principles introduced in training, compared to officers who had not yet been sent to the Academy. The shortfall was the principle of trust, which was also the procedural justice dimension that gained the lowest level of support in the training experiment.

The results of this study just appeared in the Journal of Experimental Criminology; see Skogan, Van Craen and Hennessy, 2015. Readers wishing to review the training materials themselves should directly contact the Commander of the Chicago Police Training Division, 1300 W Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607, telephone +1.312.746.8310.

In broader scope, we know virtually nothing about the short or long-term effect associated with police training of any type. This is an area ripe for good research. In 2004 a committee commissioned by the US National Academy of Sciences to look into the state of policing in the United States found that there were “scarcely more than a handful of studies” on the effects of training, and that police training and education are currently being offered without scientific evidence of their likely effects. They concluded “[T]he committee cannot overstate the importance of developing a comprehensive and scientifically rigorous program to learn what is and is not effective in the education and training of police officers” (Skogan and Frydl, 2004: 154). Wheller and Morris’ (2010) review of research on training for the UK National Police Improvement Agency cast a very wide net, incorporating systematic studies of training for “professionals” of all kinds. They were looking for guidance, but did not find much outside the domain of clinical training for health professionals. Since, Wheller et al. (2013) (now at The College of Policing) released the findings of the best experimental study of procedural justice training to date. Officers from the Greater Manchester Police Service were randomly assigned to treatment or control groups in order to determine the impact of training on the perceived quality of interactions between the police and crime victims. The training program incorporated elements of procedural justice theory. The evaluation identified positive shifts on four of eight police attitudinal outcomes, and positive effects on trained officers’ scores in role-playing exercises. The perceptions of crime victims who later were served by trained and control-group officers also differed on some measures. The training and the evaluation methods used in this study are models of how to best to proceed in this area.

What is each way betting in football?

Each way betting is a popular type of sports wagering that involves placing a bet on two different outcomes of a football match. This type of bet is commonly used in horse racing, but it can also be used in football betting. Essentially, each way betting allows you to place a bet on both the winner and the runner-up of a football match, increasing your chances of winning.

How does each way betting work in football?

In each way betting, you place two separate wagers: one on the winner of the match and one on the runner-up. If your chosen team wins the match, you win both bets. If your chosen team comes in second place, you win the second bet, but lose the first. If your team does not win or come in second place, you lose both bets.

Examples of each way betting in football

Let’s say you want to bet on a match between Team A and Team B. You place a £10 each way bet on Team A to win the match. This means that you are placing a £10 bet on Team A to win, and another £10 bet on Team A to come in second place. If Team A wins the match, you win both bets, and your payout will be based on the odds for both bets. If Team A comes in second place, you win the second bet but lose the first. If Team A does not win or come in second place, you lose both bets.

Benefits of each way betting in football

One of the main benefits of each way betting is that it reduces the risk of losing your entire wager. By placing two separate bets, you increase your chances of winning, even if your team does not come in first place. Additionally, each way betting offers the potential for larger payouts, as your payout is based on the odds for both bets.

Conclusion

Each way betting is a popular type of sports wagering that can increase your chances of winning and offer larger payouts. By placing two separate bets on the winner and runner-up of a football match, you reduce the risk of losing your entire wager and increase your potential winnings. If you are new to sports betting, we recommend trying each way betting in football to enhance your experience and potentially earn some extra cash.

What is BTTS in Football Betting?

BTTS is a type of bet where you wager on whether both teams in a match will score at least one goal each or not. If both teams score, your bet wins, and if only one team scores or neither team scores, your bet loses. BTTS betting is popular because it adds an extra layer of excitement to a match, as you’ll be cheering for both teams to score.

Understanding BTTS in Sports Betting

There are several benefits to betting on BTTS, such as higher odds and increased excitement. However, there are also risks to consider, such as the potential for high-scoring matches or unexpected defensive performances. When placing a BTTS bet, you should consider factors such as the teams’ offensive and defensive strengths, the playing style of each team, and any injuries or suspensions.

How to Bet on BTTS in Football

To bet on BTTS in football, you’ll need to choose a reputable betting site that offers this market. Once you’ve found a site, you should research the teams playing, including their scoring records, recent form, and any injuries or suspensions. Additionally, you should analyze each team’s playing style to determine how likely they are to score and concede goals. Finally, evaluate the betting odds to determine if the bet is worth taking.

Tips for Successful BTTS Betting

To increase your chances of success when betting on BTTS, start small and be patient. Set a budget and keep records of your bets to track your progress and learn from your mistakes. Additionally, avoid emotional betting and focus on analyzing the teams’ performances objectively.

Strategies for Winning with BTTS in Football

One strategy for winning with BTTS is to bet on teams with high-scoring records, particularly when playing against weaker defenses. You can also look for defensive weaknesses in a team and bet on the opposition to exploit them. Another approach is to bet on high-odds matches, where the potential payout is greater. Finally, consider the time of the game when placing your bet, as teams may change their approach in the latter stages of a match.

Conclusion

BTTS betting is a popular and exciting way to engage with football matches. By understanding the market, researching the teams and their performances, and using the right tips and strategies, you can increase your chances of success. Remember to bet responsibly and enjoy the game.

Understanding Football Betting Odds

What are odds?

Odds represent the probability of an event occurring in a football match. They determine the potential payout of a bet.

Types of odds

There are three types of odds: fractional, decimal, and American. Fractional odds are commonly used in the UK, while decimal odds are prevalent in Europe and Australia. American odds are used in the US.

How to read odds

Odds indicate the potential payout of a bet. For example, if the odds are 2.00, a $10 bet would return $20 (including the initial stake).

Choosing the Right Betting Market

Popular betting markets

Some of the popular betting markets in football include match result, over/under, correct score, and first goalscorer.

How to select the right market

Selecting the right market requires analyzing the teams, players, and recent form. It is also essential to consider the odds and potential payout.

Money Management in Football Betting

Setting a budget

Setting a budget is crucial to avoid financial losses. It is recommended to allocate a specific amount of money for betting and never exceed that limit.

Staking plan

A staking plan involves determining the amount to bet based on the odds and perceived risk. It is essential to avoid placing bets that exceed the budget.

Analyzing Teams and Players

Team form and recent performance

Analyzing the recent form of a team can provide valuable insights into their potential performance in an upcoming match.

Key player analysis

Analyzing the performance of key players, such as strikers and defenders, can help make informed betting decisions.

In-Play Betting Strategies

What is in-play betting?

In-play betting involves placing bets during a live football match. It provides more opportunities to make money but requires quick decision-making skills.

In-play betting tips

In-play betting requires analyzing the match and identifying potential opportunities. It is essential to avoid impulsive decisions and stick to a strategy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, football betting can be profitable with a strategic approach and thorough analysis. Understanding odds, choosing the right betting market, and money management are crucial. Analyzing teams and players can provide valuable insights, while in-play betting requires quick decision-making skills. By following these tips and strategies, bettors can increase their chances of making profits.